Director James Wan took a detour with "Furious 7," but he's back to the horror genre in "The Conjuring 2"; "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child" begins previews in London; Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw is one of the featured composers at Ojai.
'The Cursed Child' captures the magic of Harry Potter on stage
Earlier this week, Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling released a video, ever so politely asking theater-goers to keep a lid on what they see in the stage production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child."
Tuesday night in London, the wizarding world returned with the first preview performance of part one of the two-part play. Part two will have its first preview Thursday night.
Rowling's story was adapted for the stage by playwright Jack Thorne and veteran director of West End theater, John Tiffany. But bringing wizarding duels and potion making to the stage is a difficult task. The first preview wasn’t without a few hiccups — at one point, a real owl escaped its handler and flew into the audience.
Lizo Mzimba is an arts correspondent for the BBC and he was at the preview last night. He spoke with The Frame's Oscar Garza this morning about the much-anticipated debut.
Interview Highlights:
How intense is the Potter-mania for this production?
It's pretty intense. I think this is probably the most popular theater production in London West End history. It's pretty much sold out until March of next year, but people are excited about it even if they're not going to see it for another year or so.
How are tickets being sold? It's a two-part play and you were at part one last night. Does everyone go on consecutive nights?
During this preview period, it's slightly different. We saw part one last night and we'll see part two on Thursday. When it gets going properly, people will be able to see them on consecutive nights, or sometimes weekends with a matinee in the afternoon and then an evening performance, because there are five hours of play to fit in so they've got to shuffle it around to get it right somehow.
How many people does the theater hold?
It's about 1,500 people inside the theater and, of course, so many more wanting to get tickets. This was a preview like no other. It was packed with people. There were gasps, there were cheers, there were tears and a standing ovation at the very end. I say the very end but, of course, it's only halfway through because there's part two to come as well. I talked to one of the producers afterward and I got the sense from them that it might be a work in progress, but, considering the reaction of the audience last night, they've pretty much got it 90 percent there, with just a little bit of tweaking to get it exactly where they want it to be.
I'm curious about the price to see this play. What are tickets going for?
Well, I paid $65 sixty-five for my ticket last night. But people are paying five, ten, twenty times that much if they're trying to get it through secondary ticketing outlets. The theater and J.K. Rowling's people have been very clear that they don't want people to do that, so they're trying to crack down on people paying huge amounts for tickets and trying to make sure that everybody basically pays the same — the cover price of the ticket itself.
You mentioned J.K. Rowling. This is a new story that she wrote, not an adaptation of one of her old books. But I'm curious about the crediting. She wrote the story, but is the play itself written by Jack Thorne?
Yes, she came up with some ideas, he came up with some ideas, and John Tiffany, the director, came up with some ideas and they let them all stew together. Then, Jack Thorne went away and actually wrote the script himself, because, as J.K. Rowling said, she is not a theater playwright. She's good with ideas and that kind of thing, but for this she wanted to collaborate with someone else and let somebody with a real track record in theater actually write that script.
You mentioned the director John Tiffany, who has quite a challenge given that the movies have the incredible, lush atmosphere of this wizarding world. What is his background?
He's a very successful London theater director. He's done award-winning shows and worked with some of the biggest names. He's also worked alongside producers like Sonia Friedman, who's worked in TV and in theater and done some huge things. What their challenge here was actually to replicate what happens in people's minds when they read the books, and what they see on the cinema screen when they see the films. It's a new story, but, of course, people expect to see magic on stage. I don't want to give away very much about the plot at this point, but there's lots of illusions happening on stage and magic happening in front of your eyes. I was pretty close to the front — about eight rows back — and some of it was absolutely seamless. It was like seeing a Las Vegas show. You're thinking, How do these people do those effects like that? It really does capture, literally, the magic of Harry Potter on stage in a way that's convincing to all ages.
They're making a big effort to get the audience to keep the story secret.
Hah, they are!
But the play will be published on July 31, at which point anyone who buys the play will know the plot. Have the producers made special requests to the press to not give too much away?
Well, last night was slightly strange. It wasn't an official press event, but lots of us went along because there's such a huge amount of interest. It won't open until the end of July, but they have asked the press and everyone to not give away too much and to allow audiences to really enjoy the surprises and secrets for themselves when they see it on stage.
And this show is headed for Broadway, correct?
There is no official announcement beyond what's happening here in London, but I think you can be 99.9 percent certain that at some point it will play on Broadway.
Composer Caroline Shaw: From Pulitzer Prize to Kanye West to the Ojai Music Fest
The 70th annual Ojai Music Festival takes place from June 9-12. This year’s music director is Peter Sellars, the enigmatic stage director who’s been a longtime champion of new music and avant-garde opera. He’s programmed music by 11 different composers for the festival — and 10 of them happen to be women.
One of those composers is Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2013. Shaw has been in a bit of a whirlwind since she won the prize. “I have a lot more unanswered email,” she says, laughing. “I apologize to anyone who’s ever sent me a message.”
Shaw, who’s based in New York City, never dreamt she would win — and become the youngest person, 30 at the time, ever to do so. But the judges heard something fresh and intriguing in her piece, “Partita for 8 Voices.”
Shaw is a member of the Grammy-winning group, Roomful of Teeth, which experiments with different vocal techniques from around the world. The music Shaw writes often blends spoken text with harmony and rhythm in a way that’s somehow both alien and familiar, so it’s not unusual that she would be invited to the Ojai Music Festival this year, which often showcases the experimental and avant-garde.
“I think avant-garde can probably be defined in many different ways,” Shaw says. “So I’m excited to be a part of this whole lineup. I think all of the pieces speak to each other in slightly different ways.”
The festival will feature “Partita” and two other pieces by Shaw. One is “By and By” — her unique take on old bluegrass and gospel songs. The piece, for singer and string quartet, finds its roots in her childhood years in North Carolina.
“I love the words to these songs,” she says, “but I sometimes get frustrated when they seem to be treated so ... even like commercial country music ... they’re very upbeat. And I kind of wanted to liquefy things and slow it down, and find a different kind of way of hearing the words to the songs.”
The last piece of Shaw's is a brand new commission for the festival called, “This might also be a form of dreaming.” She was still tinkering with the piece a few days before its premiere. It’s based on a text by the American poet Claudia Rankine, and will be performed by Roomful of Teeth and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. Shaw says the piece bears an influence from some of the other artists featured in the festival, including Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. But it also has traces of one of her new collaborators — a young man named Kanye West.
“He came to a concert that Roomful of Teeth was a part of at the Disney Hall in May,” Shaw recalls. “And at intermission he came back and just wanted to say hello, and met the group, and was trying to find me. We exchanged numbers and just started talking about a couple of things that summer. And then it went from there.”
https://soundcloud.com/kanyewest/say-you-will
Shaw first contributed to the remix of West's “Say You Will,” then recently participated on three tracks from his latest album, “The Life of Pablo.” Asked what it was like for this classically-trained musician, who practically grew up with a violin in her hands and has a PhD in composition from Yale, to work with the bragadocious king of hip-hop, Shaw ponders.
“Uh... wild, exhausting, creative, inspiring, bizarre — and very cool,” she says. “I learned a lot.”
Peter Sellars has said that the high percentage of women composers represented in this year’s Ojai Music Festival is merely a coincidence, and the festival isn’t making a big deal out of it in its promotions. But it is a big deal. Most modern concert programs would be considered diverse to have just one of their featured composers be a woman.
Saariaho is making her Ojai debut. While listening to a rehearsal of “Sombre,” one of several of her works featured here, she admits she feels torn about any festival focusing on women composers.
“Of course it’s important that women composers are programmed,” she says, “but I hope they are not programmed because they are women. I always hope that my music is programmed because of my music, and not because of my gender.”
Still, Saariaho is happy the festival will throw a spotlight on the music of talented and underrepresented composers, and on rising stars such as Caroline Shaw. We’ll certainly be hearing a lot more of Shaw’s music in the coming years. Thanks in large part to the attention the Pulitzer brought, she’s now working on several commissions.
“But secretly I’d really like to work on a more studio album kind of project,” Shaw says. “It’s TBD — something that I feel like is not trying to be anything other than what I want.”
With 'Conjuring 2,' director James Wan brings back the craft of horror films past
In "The Conjuring 2," single mother Peggy Hodgson and her four children are terrorized by a very angry poltergeist in their council house outside London.
But the youngest daughter, Janet, who is played by newcomer Madison Wolfe, bears the brunt of his supernatural ire.
Like "The Conjuring," the sequel is based on true events. This time around, it’s the well-documented story of the Enfield Haunting of 1977. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga reprise their roles as paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.
James Wan returns as director for the sequel. "The Conjuring" is a franchise Wan created, along with the "Saw" and "Insidious" horror franchises. But prior to returning to horror, Wan directed "Furious 7," an action movie with a $190 million budget. To put that in perspective, the budget for "The Conjuring 2" was $40 million — much less, but still quite generous for a genre film.
Wan recently came by The Frame for a conversation with host John Horn. We begin with Wan discussing the challenges he faced in taking on an already established big-budget franchise.
Interview Highlights:
Up until "Fast and Furious 7," every movie I've made has been a film that I've created, franchises that I've created. "Fast and Furious" is the only franchise that I've directed that I did not create from scratch. So it definitely was an eye-opening experience for me coming to that world. I had to be respectful of the roles that had been established by the filmmakers before me and I was cool with that. I knew that I was coming to play in someone else's playground, but the key for me was to find something that was unique and bring my own voice to this playground.
You were doing a Twitter Q & A earlier today. In it you said, "Horror is really difficult to get right. People don't give it enough credit." Is it a little bit like comedy where if you're scared or you're laughing, people think it's not that hard to do?
It really is. It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work. For them to be able to suspend the real world and be part of your world takes a lot of understanding of the genre and takes a lot of craftsmanship to get them there.
One of the things that is clearly really important to you is sound design. In one scene, a girl takes a chair and tries to wedge it under the doorknob. In the sounds of that scene, you hear the girl breathing, the chair, the score and the sound effects. Tell us about the elements that go into a scene like that?
Just to give it a bit more context: That one moment is very important because I wanted to shoot the sequence where the little girl goes into the room ... to barricade the door. Then, when she runs to the bed, the camera follows her and we stay on her. Off camera — we don't see it — we hear something getting thumped and then we hear something getting dragged away. I think that is the kind of stuff that sends a chill down your spine because you're not expecting that to happen. The fact that it all happened off camera and only using sound design, it just fires up your imagination even more as to what that could be. So much of all this is about building anticipation. For me, what usually makes a horror sequence scary is the journey not the destination.
As part of that journey too, in this film in particular, you are very focused on how this film looks. It is noticeable that you have worried a lot about cinematography. You hired Don Burgess, who shot "Forrest Gump," "Castaway" and "Contact" — not a guy who typically works in genre.
He did make one great genre film: "What Lies Beneath."
Right, a $100 million genre film.
Yeah! (laughs)
In the "Conjuring 2," there are long tracking shots, complicated camera moves and very detailed images. In addition to sound design, why is the beauty — and I use that word decidedly — of this film important to you?
My filmmaking tends to be very classical. Because of that, and because I'm a big fan of classical cinema and filmmaking, it's about what you can do with the camera work, what you can do with the sound design, what you can do with the music and editing toward crafting a sequence that means something and tells a story. Because of that, I really put a lot of emphasis on my camera work. I'm a very visual director and I think you can tell so much of a sequence by how you move your camera or if you hold your camera back. So the great thing about someone like Don Burgess is, having done so many of the great movies with [Robert] Zemeckis, I could throw all kinds of crazy camera work at him and he would rise to the challenge. So capturing the beauty of this movie is very important to me because I really wanted it to have that classical sort of atmosphere and a mood that we've come to love from a lot of the old-school horror films that we grew up with.
When you see a young girl or a young woman in most genre films, you know very quickly that they are going to become a victim and they're not going to have much to do. But your actress, Madison Wolfe, who plays the young lead of Janet in this film, is more than a victim. She is her own person. She has to do incredibly difficult stuff in terms of performance. Can you talk about finding that actor and what she was required to do in that job.
Listen, finding Madison Wolfe was the big, top secret for us. That role of Janet Hodgson is such a demanding role because it demands a kid to start off the movie really young and naive and innocent, then over the course of the film become more and more afflicted by the poltergeist that haunts her house. Then she becomes very troubled.
We searched far and wide for someone who could play this British character because the true life story aspect of it, of Janet Hodgson, is so well documented. You can find stories about her. You can find so many things about her everywhere. So in looking all over England for this particular actress — we even searched all the way to Australia — I never for the life of me thought that I would actually find this particular actress of all places in Louisiana. The thing that blew us away was that when she came in to have a first meeting with myself, the producer and the casting director, she came in wearing a wig [and] contact lenses, and she spoke in an English accent for the entire meeting. I was so shocked by how dedicated this 11-year-old kid was to her craft. I really think when people see her in this movie they're going to be so blown away by how gifted she is. I remember my casting director saying to me, "James I think that I've found the person for you. This is a young Jodie Foster."
One of the things that's important, and I guess also a little tricky with a movie like this, is that it's based on a true story. How do you make sure that the people who are still alive, some of whom experienced this, are satisfied by your interpretation and that you follow the basic contours of what happened, but embellish it with enough dramatic invention so that it entertains?
Yeah, that is a fine line that I had to walk here. You're right that a lot of the people that this story happened to are still around. I always say that I'm not making a documentary. I'm making a movie that is quite subjective. It's told through the point of view of the people that this happened to. And so, for that reason, I had to be respectful to these people. At the same time, I also take artistic licensing to craft what it is that I think the audiences want to see, which is a scary movie and to have a good time. For me, it was about using the true life aspect and all the reported true life events and use that as a foundation to build my set pieces and to expand on the characters in the story.
Your film is made by New Line and Warner Bros. A lot of genre films are made by independent companies or independently distributed ones. How important to you is it that big studios are getting back in the genre business and at a budget level that these movies often need?
Yeah, that's really the thing, you know. We've seen in recent years, actually even way back to when I made my first movie, "Saw," which was an independent movie. It felt like all the good exciting and adventurous horror films were made from filmmakers from the independent world. The indie world really allows you to take chances and do things that are more out there that you can't really take if you were making a commercial horror film for a studio.
Of course, there are filmmakers who grew up watching "The Exorcist" and "Rosemary's Baby."
Exactly, and that's a thing that I like to remind people, that all the movies that people and critics love were studio horror films made by respectable filmmakers.
Billy Friedkin, Roman Polanski...
Kubrick. And Spielberg with "Jaws." These were really great respectable filmmakers. And so there's a part of me that would really like to push studio horror filmmaking back to the quality of the old days and remind people what it is that they love about those movies in the first place. It would be great to get these indie, horror filmmakers who have had success and give them the resources and the creative freedom to make their horror movies, but with a proper budget.